In recent years, there has been a surge of development and releases of new types of mobile devices made available to the public. Today's consumer is often equipped with a smart phone, tablet, portable media player or other device that can be used to access the internet, download and view digital media (e.g. video and audio files), and perform a wide variety of other functions. Given such large numbers of devices and device types, it is quickly becoming a non-trivial task to make media content available to all of the consumers across their various devices. In fact, many companies are spending large fractions of their time and resources managing, scaling and maintaining media processing systems that may have nothing to do with their core business. These companies are looking for encoding systems and services that can provide the best video/audio quality to consumers at a low cost. Because digital video (and audio) content is often delivered to multiple device types over unmanaged networks with fluctuating bandwidth, it is desirable to produce a version of each asset to accommodate some or all of these variants.